Client onboarding cut from six days to one — and Friday reports that write themselves
A 15-person marketing agency was drowning in its own growth: every new client meant days of manual setup, and every Friday meant half the team assembling reports. We automated both ends — onboarding and reporting — and gave them their delivery capacity back.
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- manual work removed weekly
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- faster client onboarding
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- tools connected into one flow
The challenge
Where it started
Winning a new client triggered a six-day scramble: contracts filed in one tool, project boards built by hand in another, access requests over email, kickoff docs assembled from the last client's folder (with the last client's name occasionally still in them). Two account managers spent most of their week on setup and status updates instead of strategy.
Reporting was worse. Every Friday, performance data from ad platforms, analytics, and email tools was copy-pasted into slide decks — five hours per account manager, every week, with numbers that were stale by Monday.
The approach
What we built
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1
Map the onboarding assembly line
We documented every step from signed contract to kickoff call, then rebuilt it as a Make.com scenario: signature triggers workspace creation, project templates, access provisioning, and a personalized welcome sequence — automatically.
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2
One source of truth in Airtable
Client records, deliverables, and deadlines live in a single Airtable base that every other tool reads from. Renaming a campaign in one place renames it everywhere.
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3
Self-writing reports
Nightly syncs pull performance data into Sheets; OpenAI drafts the narrative summary against each client's goals; the assembled report lands in Slack for a human once-over before it ships. Friday afternoons returned to being work time.
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4
Alerting instead of checking
Budget pacing, overdue deliverables, and anomalous metrics now push notifications to the right person — nobody "checks in on" dashboards anymore.
The stack
- Make.com
- Airtable
- Slack
- Google Sheets
- OpenAI
- HubSpot
The results
What changed
Onboarding now takes one day, most of it the human parts that should stay human. Account managers reclaimed 22 hours a week between them, reporting is consistent across every account, and the agency took on four new retainers without a single ops hire.
“It hasn't dropped a single lead since — and I check the error channel maybe once a month.”
Your operation has a story like this waiting to happen
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